Macro N Cheese

** Join our community-building online gathering where we listen to the episode together and discuss it in a relaxed, supportive atmosphere. Tuesday, March 17, at 8pm ET/5pm PT. https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/o3miFIPmSAC2d46Vh14iBA
One of our favorite guests is back to talk about the central problem facing much of the Global South. It is not simply bad policy or weak leadership, but the persistence of colonial economic structures. He explains that many countries, especially in Africa, remain trapped in roles designed by empire: exporters of cheap raw materials, importers of finished goods, and sites for low-value production. Political independence did not end these structures, and debt, IMF intervention, and external pressure have only deepened the trap.
"Colonialism and its economic structures were not designed for development, they were not designed for democracy, they were not designed for justice, they were not designed to produce a just transition or human rights or any of these things. If anything, colonialism and its economic structures were hierarchical, abusive, violent, extractive."
Fadhel was one of the economists we originally turned to for our education in MMT. In this conversation with Steve he makes the case that MMT is not a theory of everything. Issues of race, class, and colonialism require their own lenses. Whether the issue is climate change, migration, development, or reparations, the entry point has to be the lived material conditions. MMT becomes crucial when the question turns to how to mobilize resources, avoid debt traps, and finance transformation without inflationary collapse.
Dr. Fadhel Kaboub is a Tunisian American economist. He is an Associate Professor of Economics at Denison University and president of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. He’s the author of Global South Perspectives on Substack. In 2025, Dr. Kaboub was recognized by the New Africa Magazine in the top 100 most influential Africans under the Thinkers and Opinion Shapers category. He currently serves a two-year term on the United Nations High Level Advisory Board on Economic and Social Affairs at UN DESA.
Find his work at globalsouthperspectives.substack.com
@FadhelKaboub on X

** We’ll discuss this episode on Tuesday, March 10th (8 pm ET/5 pm PT) in our online community gathering, Macro ‘n Chill. We’ve invited Erald Kolasi to join us. So bring your questions. Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/hvkv5uyKQkG8DvgUMCckcw
Erald Kolasi is back to attack the bourgeois narrative on immigration, which reduces it to a series of individual choices. He and Steve dig into the material roots of migration, showing how empire, land theft, war, labor exploitation, and capitalist crisis have shaped global migration flows for centuries.
They ground the discussion in Wallerstein's world-systems theory, defining an empire not by its internal politics but by its extractive external relations, and trace the concrete historical processes of this extraction. The "migration boomerang" from US destabilization in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador – driven by the needs of capital like the United Fruit Company – demonstrates the dialectic in action.
The empire's domination creates the displaced peoples it then scapegoats to divide the working class. Erald connects this to the long arc of capitalist development, from the Atlantic slave system to the prison-industrial complex, showing how the ruling class has always used race and nationality to prevent united class consciousness.
With the MMT lens, Steve explains that this is directly tied to how a Federal Job Guarantee would shatter this dynamic by eliminating the "reserve army of labor" and the power of capital to discipline workers.
Erald Kolasi is a writer and researcher focusing on the nexus between energy, technology, economics, complex systems, and ecological dynamics. His book, The Physics of Capitalism, came out from Monthly Review Press in February 2025. He received his PhD in Physics from George Mason University in 2016. You can find out more about Erald and his work on his website, www.eraldkolasi.com.
Subscribe to his Substack: https://substack.com/@technodynamics

While we’re being distracted by chatbots and AI gimmicks, Silicon Valley is quietly embedding its products into surveillance systems, border enforcement, battlefield logistics, and even nuclear command-and-control. The real money isn’t in selfies with AI. It’s in Pentagon contracts and permanent war footing.
Investigative reporter Peter Byrne is back to talk with Steve about his 10-part Military AI Watch series at Project Censored. It’s a chilling and materialist analysis of the military-industrial-AI complex.
Naming names and following the funding trails, Peter reveals how firms tied to Palantir, Google, and other tech giants are positioning AI as indispensable to “national security.” Meanwhile, the systems themselves remain prone to hallucination, data poisoning, and catastrophic error.
War games escalate to nuclear exchange. (Does anyone remember War Games, the movie? Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy play a teenage nerd and a popular girl who save the world from the nuclear destruction they almost launched. Sigh... innocent times.) Civilian infrastructure becomes battlefield terrain. And the comforting promise of a “human in the loop” is a marketing slogan instead of a safeguard. 2001: A Space Odyssey eerily feels both prescient and naive by comparison. Hollywood likes to personalize everything. The villain is wacky or evil; it's never the economic system.
As their conversation continues, Steve and Peter look at class power, media complicity, and the illusion that electoral politics alone can rein in a self-directing war machine.
Peter Byrne is an award-winning investigative science reporter who has long uncovered corruption at the nexus of science and industry. Now, in partnership with Project Censored, Byrne has launched Military AI Watch, a groundbreaking ten-part series published on Project Censored’s website.
https://www.projectcensored.org/military-ai-watch/
Find all of Peter’s work here: https://www.peterbyrne.info/

“...Some are dancing, some are drowning, but in the end everybody’s going to go under.”
Dr. Ali Kadri (Sun Yat-sen University), author of the Unmaking of Arab Socialism, joins Steve to talk about imperialism, development, and why the Arab world keeps getting put through the capitalist meat grinder. Ali argues that capitalism isn’t just markets and greed. It’s a destructive social relationship. Once you look at it that way, many of the world’s mysteries stop being mysterious: war, austerity, pollution, and mass deaths aren’t accidents that occasionally happen to capitalism. They are outcomes to be monetized.
The conversation moves to imperialism as capitalism in its concentrated, caffeinated, and brutal form, especially under finance-dominance. Ali describes genocide as both direct (bombs, occupation, ethnic cleansing) and structural (avoidable hunger, disease, debt-driven collapse). He frames the destruction of Arab socialist and anti-colonial projects as strategic for empire: control of oil, geography, and the political threat of regional solidarity.
They talk about MMT’s explanation of currency and how the dollar functions as a lever. Ali sees the dollar as power, representing control over global resources and labor. Debt dependence becomes a kind of colonization by spreadsheet.
“If the dollar stops for a minute or for a month or so, then we have people going hungry. And so this is a form of colonization, a form of death by the dollar.”
They close by pulling democracy down from the clouds. Steve suggests bourgeois elections merely deliver a reshuffling of managers for the same system, and Ali produces a simple metaphor: a multiple-choice exam. The choices have been pre-loaded. And in elections, the result is still class rule.
Dr. Ali Kadri is a Visiting Professor at Sun Yat-sen University. He has previously held senior roles at the National University of Singapore and the London School of Economics. His academic work focuses on the political economy of development, imperialism, and the Arab world. He is the author of several important books, including The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction; China’s Path to Development: Against Neoliberalism; and The Unmaking of Arab Socialism.

Can Marxists and MMTers find common ground, or are they doomed to be strategic enemies?
Steve’s guest is Australian labor historian and organizer Owen Bennett, who founded the Australian Unemployed Workers’ Union in 2015, and more recently, Unionists for a Job Guarantee in 2024. He and Steve explore how to tackle the deep divide between Modern Monetary Theory and the Marxist left. Owen argues that the left's current dismissal of full-employment policy is a historic break from a time when communists and unionists successfully fought for – and won – some major concessions under capitalism. We should look to establish that kind of unity.
If the state is a tool of the oligarchs, is fighting for a policy like the Job Guarantee a distraction from revolution, or is it a necessary front in the class war? Steve and Owen discuss austerity, strategy, and whether "socialism or bust" has left the working class with nothing at all.
Owen Bennett is a unionist, university tutor, PhD graduate in labour history, activist, author, and researcher. He has published widely on the history of working class struggles against unemployment in Australia. His book on the struggle for full employment in post-war Australia is forthcoming.
Owen founded the Australian Unemployed Workers Union in 2015 and, more recently, Unionists for a Job Guarantee in 2024.